


Goatmom’s Cyclical Grief

by thisjustout



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Character Analysis, Gen, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-08-26 22:16:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16689934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisjustout/pseuds/thisjustout
Summary: If Toriel really wants to protect us, why does she stay behind in the Ruins?





	Goatmom’s Cyclical Grief

Upon finding “a box of kids’ shoes in a disparity of sizes” in Toriel’s home, some players become suspicious. They steel themselves for a violent betrayal a la _Hansel and Gretel_. But of course Toriel is no evil witch, just a well-written, believably flawed character. Her violence is born of love: she wants to protect us.

> Every human that falls down here meets the same fate. I have seen it again and again. They come. They leave. They die. You naive child... If you leave the RUINS... They... ASGORE... Will kill you. I am only protecting you, do you understand?

Although, if Toriel truly wants to protect the human children from falling into Asgore’s hands, then why does she allow them to leave the Ruins on their own? She is one of the most powerful monsters in the Underground; why does she not follow them and offer substantive protection? Part of it, certainly, is Asgore himself. Leaving the comfort of the Ruins would mean confronting her ex-husband and all the painful memories he represents. But I believe there is another reason, one that even Toriel herself is unaware of.

Theorists have suspected for a while that Chara was particularly attached to Asgore, and Asriel likewise to Toriel. (“I thought of all people, SHE could make me feel whole again,” says Flowey of his mother, while the knitted sweater addressed to “Mr. Dad Guy” likely came from the adopted child.) What if, in the other direction, the feelings were reversed? Asgore doesn’t even mention Chara when he’s pouring his heart out to Frisk. He speaks of “the day after my son died,” and when he says, “I just want to see my child,” one can only assume that he’s still talking about Asriel—that’s “child,” singular.

I don’t doubt that both kids were sincerely loved by both goatparents, but that doesn’t preclude either parent from having a “favorite” child—one they felt a little more fondness for, even as they genuinely cared for both. And I believe that Toriel’s favorite child is Chara. Her behavior in the Ruins certainly speaks to this; after burying Chara’s body right beneath the hole they first fell through, she checks each day to see if any more humans have fallen down. In a sense she is checking Chara’s grave to see if any new replacements have arrived. And once they do, she tries to establish herself as a mother figure— _this is your home now, here is your curriculum, you will live here happily forever under my care._ All of this, I believe, indicates Toriel’s desire to relive the experience of adopting Chara.

After leaving Frisk at the gate of the Ruins, Toriel [returns to the grave](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRiFq0ciR68&t=4m29s), and for the rest of the game she ignores our phone calls. This suggests to me that (1) she has already written Frisk off as dead and (2, not unrelated) she has gone into mourning over Chara. It would seem, then, that she is reenacting not only Chara’s adoption but **also their death**. Her way of dealing with Chara’s death is to relive it, over and over again, using the new humans who fall in as stand-ins for Chara themself.

To return to the original question, Toriel fails to meaningfully protect these children because she _(unconsciously!!!)_ wants them to die so she can fulfill her private reenactment of grief. When she tells Frisk, “Please do not come back,” she is effectively saying, “Please don’t remind me that you’re still alive—I want to mourn your death now, and you being alive would kind of put a damper on that.” And so the players suspicious of Toriel were right all along: she is very nearly—on every level except the literal—an evil witch who tosses kids into the fire for her own satisfaction.

She does this _seven times_.

To her credit, she eventually breaks out of this cycle.

 

([Evidence suggests](http://saveloadreset.tumblr.com/post/165228997043/sorry-whats-the-proof-that-chara-and-gaster-were) that Chara fell into the Ruins when monsterkind was still cooped up at Home, and was alive during the trek to New Home and the creation of the Core. It’s possible that Toriel’s fondest memories of Chara are tied up in Home, and that she associates the journey to New Home as a kind of beginning-of-the-end of their happy times, a prelude to Chara’s death. Hence, the very act of a child leaving the Ruins is enough to trigger Toriel’s “Well, time to grieve now” response.

The blogger linked above, saveloadreset, proposes that “Chara fell and spent some time in the RUINS, but maybe not a lot of time, and maybe they did _not_ spend that time living with the Dreemurrs as their adopted child.” If Toriel’s fondest memories of Chara are from Home, then it seems those memories are specifically from the time before Chara was adopted. Yet she tries to act as a mother figure to each new fallen child while still in the Ruins; her reenactment diverges pretty starkly from reality in this way. Maybe she believes that, if only they’d never left Home, they could have been a happy family, and she uses the new children to live out this wishful thinking, to correct the supposed mistakes of the past. Maybe playing the mother is in and of itself a prelude to death; in her reenactment, “Time to be Chara’s mother now” means “Get ready to start grieving.” Or maybe Toriel saw herself as Chara’s mother even before Chara was officially adopted into the family.)

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this post was almost “They Come; They Leave; They Die; I Cry; Rinse and Repeat.” I originally published it on Tumblr as [three](http://gaytog.tumblr.com/post/170950621985/heres-an-idea-we-know-that-chara-developed-a) [separate](http://gaytog.tumblr.com/post/171379757240/goatmoms-cyclical-grief) [posts](http://gaytog.tumblr.com/post/172824702520/at-the-end-of-my-toriel-post-i-guessed-the) between February and April of 2018; they’ve been consolidated and expanded upon here. This is my first serious attempt at psychoanalytic character analysis, and I’m pretty happy with it!


End file.
